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Talk:George Orwell
When I was in Rangoon I would get e-mails from various acquaintances openly asking me questions in which criticisms of SLORC were implicit. E-mails are subject to police monitoring there so such criticism is dangerous, not only in sent mails but in received ones. Since both locations from which I accessed the Internet were in places I wasn't legally supposed to be anyway (one was a school and the other was a private home), receiving these mails potentially posed a rather severe danger to my hosts. So I had to find ways to tell these people to shut up without acknowledging what they had written, without mentioning the insecurity of the communication and preferably giving the appearace of enjoying my "vacation." The most effective route would have been to lie and say that the regime was in fact perfectly legitimate and benevolent and was the victim of a smear campaign in the international press, but shilling for a dictatorship struck me as distasteful, even though I knew I'd be able to set the record straight the minute I got back to the free world. A less direct, more palatable tactic I tried was to tell people "It's a lot like it's portrayed in the Orwell novel." My hope was that the police, being from Myanmar, would most closely associate Orwell with Burmese Days, while Westerners would be reminded of 1984 and understand that I was being monitored. Not sure whether the police were fooled (apparently variations on that Orwell trick are tried fairly frequently so I would assume some smart officer is aware of it) but no one to whom I wrote that caught the reference. I even got back one response that said "Orwell, huh? Animal Farm was pretty good, one of these days I'm going to read 1984." By contrast, editing this wiki from Rangoon was so delightfully safe that I did about as much here as the slow and spotty Internet connections would allow. It helped that it's the most boring city of millions you could ever hope to see. No one has enough disposable income to support much of a nightlife, and those who do spend it in private. Turtle Fan 04:20, March 17, 2010 (UTC) :This certainly pushes Rangoon further down on my list of places to visit. TR 16:10, March 17, 2010 (UTC) ::It's the kind of postcolonial slum that most of Asia escaped being decades ago: Think Seoul in the 50s, Manila in the 70s, Hanoi in the 90s--or, come to think of it, American cities in the mid-nineteenth century. TV and Internet are both available more often than not, but otherwise. . . . And when SE Asia was decolonized it was the most developed city in the region, well ahead not just of what are now upstart metropolises in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia, but those of what are now completely first world countries like Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. ::When a Westerner applies for a tourist visa (through an arcane process that comes halfway to being a human rights violation itself) they assume he's a spy, undercover journalist, or (in my case, correctly) undercover volunteer. All three are equally illegal and they work on the assumption that every single Western tourist is one or more. They may be right; if someone were to go as a plain and simple tourist, he'd die of boredom. The plus side is, it takes three days for them to do whatever they do by way of background check, so that's three days in Bangkok at your leisure, and the irregularity of commercial flights also makes it likely you'll spend a few more days there on the back end. So I got my vacation that way. And Bangkok's nice. I wish I'd had more time there, maybe a little time for an overnight sidetrip to Phnom Penh or Kuala Lumpur--I could have arranged that easily enough if I'd known . . . some things which no one bothered to tell me, but that's another story. ::Anyway, the work I did there is something I can feel good about putting my name on, though I'm painfully aware of how much less it was than what those people really need. And having spent a little time in a dictatorship is a healthy thing for someone who's spent his whole life in a democracy. One learns to appreciate our system more, and to forgive it the flaws which ordinarily have us so incensed. Turtle Fan 19:44, March 17, 2010 (UTC) Cameo in Hitler's War ? So I was browsing through a copy of this book and came to this paragraph where the Lincoln Brigade is leaving the Ebro from Madrid in early A-1939: Spanish anarchist militiamen came forward to take the International Brigade's place on the Ebro line. They had a sprinkling of foreigners with them, too; as Chaim the POV character trudged toward the railhead down in Tortosa, he exchanged nods with a tall, pale, skinny fellow with a dark mustache and hair who had to come from England or Ireland. "Well, bugger me if that is not a George Orwell cameo", I said to myself. But then I checked it and found that Orwell had been wounded and discharged in early '37, leaving for England to never come back to Spain. Of course, we could just assume that this didn't happen in the alternate timeline since the actual POD is Sanjurjo surviving in 1936 - but, on the other hand, the SCW in this book is absurdly identical to ours up to late 1938, with the rebels pursuing the exact same campaigns despite the change in leadership and even LB commander Robert Merriman being said to be MIA by then (he is presumed to have been killed shortly after the Battle of Teruel in early '38 in OTL). :He's tall, he's brunette, he's from England...I agree, it almost has to be Orwell. And even though the war didn't change much before 1938, so Orwell should be wounded, well, that hasn't always stopped Turtledove. TR 23:25, April 3, 2011 (UTC) Deletion of subsections Orwell makes direct appearances in Worldwar and The War That Came Early. All other subsections are simply discussions of his work. Some have in-universe significance but are best left in the 1984 article rather than the man's article. Others, such as the Supervolcano bit, don't even rate that much, and are just lit refs.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 08:40, August 28, 2016 (UTC) :The Supervolcano discussion also includes Animal Farm so it wouldn't fit in the 1984 article. Likewise, Cade Curtis contemplates other works by Orwell besides 1984. This is not to say those shouldn't be moved into "Lit. Ref." but only it covers multiple works by the man rather than one particular novel. ML4E (talk) 17:19, August 30, 2016 (UTC) Worldwar In DtE it is stated that he died of TB on schedule with OTL.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 07:47, July 31, 2019 (UTC) :I find that hard to believe. At no point did any character in that book display any awareness of living in an alternate timeline, much less of having knowledge of OTL. Turtle Fan (talk) 08:11, July 31, 2019 (UTC) ::Putting it more accurately, we learn that Blair died 10 or 15 years prior to pg 165 of DtE, that is to say sometime between 1949 and 1954. So it's not quite correct to dogmatically say he died on the OTL schedule. He might have died sooner thanks to the presence of the Race and chemical weapons. Or he might have squeezed out an extra 4 years by skipping his career as a novelist. TR (talk) 14:15, July 31, 2019 (UTC)